Abstract
This chapter presents five cases to demonstrate continuities in state responses to already-existing interstices: the gun frontiers of Africa and North America (1650–1850), the Ottoman ghazi system (1400–1826), petite guerre in North America (1660–1814), the operations of the British East India Company in India (1700–1865), and the civil war in Mozambique (1975–1992).
In some of these cases, state actors encounter already-existing interstices as third parties to an ongoing conflict; in other cases, the interstice lies between two different sovereign systems entirely. Lastly, interstice exploitation may represent the maturation of previous interstice-opening actions.
The five cases are used to highlight two key characteristics of interstice exploiters as tools of interstitial war: interface sovereignty (i.e., capacity to provide points of contact with the sovereign patron), and capacity for compellence (i.e., the ability to use violence in ways which compel strategic actions by targeted entities).
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Notes
- 1.
Thomas Schelling, Arms and Influence (USA: Yale University Press, 1966).
- 2.
David J. Silverman, Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America (USA: Harvard University Press, 2016).
- 3.
Robin Law, “Warfare on the West African Slave Coast, 1650–1850” (103–126) in R. Brian Ferguson and Neil L. Whitehead (eds.) War in the Tribal Zone: Expanding States and Indigenous Warfare (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1992).
- 4.
Law (idem.) cites African trade data showing that while in the 1650s, 3 slaves could be bought for two guns, by the 1720s each slave cost 20 guns or 300 lbs of gunpowder. These figures seem good for the predator polities, but they also indicate the inherent instability of the gun frontier and the markets that it sustained.
- 5.
Stephen P. Reyna, Wars without End: The Political Economy of a Pre-colonial African State (USA: University Press of New England, 1990).
- 6.
Edward Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire: From the First Century A.D. to the Third (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).
- 7.
Douglas E Streusand, Islamic Gunpowder Empires: Ottomans, Safavids and Mughals (USA: Westview Press, 2011), pp. 24–26.
- 8.
Mancur Olson, Power and Prosperity: Outgrowing Communist and Capitalist Dictatorships (USA: Oxford University Press, 2000).
- 9.
Paul Wittek, The Rise of the Ottoman Empire (USA: Burt Franklin, 1971), p. 14.
- 10.
Streusand, Islamic Gunpowder Empires, p. 80.
- 11.
Wittek, Rise. Ibid.
- 12.
Wittek, Rise. pp. 17–19.
- 13.
Streusand, Islamic Gunpowder Empires, p. 82.
- 14.
Wittek, Rise, pp. 32–36.
- 15.
Roger Crowley, Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World (USA: Random House, 2008), p. 27.
- 16.
Ibid. Indeed, Hayrettin Barbarossa would go from being pasha of Algiers to commanding the entire Ottoman fleet until his retirement in Istanbul in 1545.
- 17.
J.D. DeVilliers. “The Pandour Corps at the Cape during the rule of the Dutch East India Company.” The South African Military History society (June 1975). http://samilitaryhistory.org/vol033jv.html. Accessed January 24, 2019.
- 18.
Jérôme Lacroix-Leclair and Eric Ouellet, “The Petite Guerre in New France, 1660–1759: An Institutional Analysis”, Canadian Military Journal, Vol. 11, No. 4, Autumn 2011.
- 19.
Stephen R. Bown, Merchant Kings: When Companies Ruled the World, 1600–1900, (USA: Thomas Donne Books, 2009), p. 114.
- 20.
“The eighteenth century’s golden age of legitimate privateering had its origins in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries during the endemic European warfare afflicting the times and the rise of a merchant class capable of financing these ventures … [d]uring King William’s War the French took the strategy a step further. When his fleet became largely bottled up, and with the expenses of major land campaigns eating up his treasury, Louis XIV permitted armateurs to outfit French Warships for privateering expeditions, in effect encouraging French men-of-war to cruise as privateers.” Benerson Little, The Sea Rover’s Practice: Pirate Tactics and Techniques, 1630–1730 (VA: Potomac Books, 2007), p. 16.
- 21.
Bruce Buchan “Pandours, Partisans, and Petite Guerre: The Two Dimensions of Enlightenment Discourse on War,” Intellectual History Review, 23:3 (2013), pp. 329–347.
- 22.
Fred Anderson, The War that made America. A Short History of the French and Indian War. (USA: Penguin, 2005), pp. 91–112.
- 23.
Idem., 129–130.
- 24.
Ironically, the end of unrestrained petite guerre between Europeans did not mean the end of la guerre sauvage. In North America after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and the War of 1812, what had once been a continent full of dynamic and competing colonial expansions had now become a continent full of wars of domination and pacification, as white colonists deployed unrestrained violence against indigenous forces rather than restrained violence against one other. At the same time in Europe, the Napoleonic revolutions would replace the brief heyday of more-or-less restrained conventional war with the totalizing wars of nation against nation. For a fascinating account locating the rise of totalizing war in the eighteenth century rather than the twentieth as one might think, see David A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (USA: Houghton. Mifflin, 2007).
- 25.
John Keay, The Honorable Company: A History of the English East India Company (UK: HarperCollins, 1993), p. 128.
- 26.
Bown, Merchant Kings.
- 27.
William Dalyrymple. March 2015. “The East India Company: The original corporate raiders.” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/04/east-india-company-original-corporate-raiders. Accessed January 24, 2019.
- 28.
Keay, The Honorable Company, p. xix.
- 29.
William Finnegan A Complicated War: The Harrowing of Mozambique (USA: University of California Press, 1992), p. 117.
- 30.
Alexander Vines. Renamo: Terrorism in Mozambique (UK: Centre for Southern African Studies, 1991), p. 5.
- 31.
Finnegan, A Complicated War, p. 69. Anti-communists, of course, immediately drew a parallel between FRELIMO and the Khmer Rouge, who were forcibly returning Cambodia to an agrarian existence around the same time.
- 32.
JoAnn McGregor. “Violence and social change in a border economy: War in the Maputo hinterland, 1984–1992,” Journal of Southern African Studies, March 1998, Vol. 24, Issue 1, pp. 37–61.
- 33.
James Turner. A Continent Ablaze: The Insurgency Wars in Africa, 1960 to the Present (South Africa: Jonathan Ball, 1998), pp. 129–130. RENAMO continued to be known as the MNR or MNRA until 1979.
- 34.
Hilton Hamann, Days of the Generals: The untold story of South Africa’s apartheid-era military generals (South Africa: Struik Publishers, 2007), p. 105.
- 35.
Finnegan, A Complicated War, p. 79.
- 36.
Finnegan, A Complicated War, p. 74.
- 37.
Peter Stiff, The Silent War: South African Recce Operations 1969–1994 (UK: Galago Publishing, 1999), p. 376.
- 38.
Joseph Hanlon, Beggar Your Neighbors: Apartheid Power in Southern Africa (USA: Indiana University Press, 1986); William Minter, Apartheid’s Contras: An Inquiry into the Roots of War in Angola and Mozambique (South Africa: Witwatersrand Press, 1994).
- 39.
Finnegan, A Complicated War, p. 97.
- 40.
Turner, Continent Ablaze, pp. 135–136.
- 41.
Finnegan, A Complicated War, p. 79. Admittedly, the fact that RENAMO retained Alfonse Dhlakama as its head all the way through its relationship with South Africa indicates that this practice, if it existed at all, was not widespread at higher levels.
- 42.
Stiff, The Silent War, pp. 380–381.
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Craig, D. (2020). Interstice Exploiters. In: Sovereignty, War, and the Global State. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19886-2_3
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